There are no happy endings in this collection. The poems analyse past, upsetting relationships in symbolic imagery that refers to a natural world, and often gardens that are invaded by weeds. She observes and describes in detail, with a proliferation of beguiling images that are always to the point. In some of her poems, the author reverses the male gaze, making herself the subject who perceives, loves, suffers and judges.

In a feminine perspective of endurance, the figure of Lavinia, from Titus Andronicus, is evoked. Similarly to the poet, she keeps writing despite her hands having been cut off and her tongue severed:

    her new language

     scribbling from her mouth

     her wrists

     her fluent heart.

           (‘Following Lavinia’, III. Paul)

     They took her tongue, her hands

     so she tried to write with driftwood, sand.

                  (‘Following Lavinia’, VI. Their Names)

Lavinia’s story is a brutal example of abuses perpetrated on women. She is violently raped, her tongue and hands are cut off, and she is then executed. The poet, reflecting on her own sense of amputated self, keeps writing, communicating like Lavinia, weaving, tracing her thoughts “over chairs, walls, floors” (‘Lavinia Writes’). The recurrent motif of ‘hands’ - Lavinia’s amputated hands, but also referring to the Grimm story of the girl without hands - also reveals the marks of hard work, and resonances of grievances, and of the passing of time:

     On the bus two women show each other their hands

     brush one finger along another

     pause above a joint to strum creases

     in skin they’ve worn so long

     they admire and grieve the time it keeps

     …

     but we keep finding new detail in our hands

     wrinkles, shallows between ridged veins.

     We hadn’t noticed this fine work

     blood in relief when we turn our wrists

     ink-blue and hard.

                                                 (‘Hands’)

Hands also imply the use of weapons, the hand of the executioner and the smooth hand of the seducer, two faces of the same coin that conspire in love:

     I spent the afternoon

     reading about our ancient hands

     an essay arguing their evolution for use of weapons

     not fruit-picking or peaceful tools.

     …

     I follow your piano fingers

     honed for three million years.

     My skin remembers seduction

     you tapped time on my spine

     altered my rhythm

     lifted fine threads

     until my blood re-tuned.

                                   (‘Manus’)

The hands of the pianist are the hands that can hold a life-threatening weapon, and the hands of the lover make her blood shimmer when he touches her. Passion and death merge in the Scottish ballad ‘O I’ve loved too much’, leaving the forsaken woman lost and lonely, gathering and shaping her dead, ‘suck[ing] on fingers, paws, toes’ (‘My Black Gardens’).

Parker’s poetry has a fragmented quality that renders her shattered feelings through symbolic imageries that work as metaphors and convey powerful emotions:

     I spent a day reading deep water

     fish six thousand metres down

     making light in their skin.

     …

     I watched him

     as light without source

     selected parts of his body.

     It was as if he was glowing

     making light in his skin.

     I still held the afterimage

     of the day’s page

     its glossy ink, flashing fish.

                             (‘Ghosting’)

     I can’t look at you. I keep my eyes on crockery

     notice you are split between glass, chrome, china

     your index finger a pink glow in the saltcellar’s skirt

     face a pale glaze on white plates.

                                                        (‘Crockery’)

Although the poet reveals a damaged self marked by break-ups and exhausted by unrequited love, she is in control. her sensual female gaze is the subject of the relationship, not the object:

     fills in his lips with different reds

     daubing the brush for a full mouth.

     He pales while she mixes a wash

     for his skin: cream, watered pink.

     …

     She slides a hand beneath him,

     finds his shirt soaked in heat

     where his blood has pooled.

     Paint exhales its linseed.

     Colours begin to fix.

                           (‘She Paints Him’)

She is the painter, not the model, the poet, not the muse. In spite of her ‘Black Gardens’, “New paint begins to blend/Gardenia rolled over our touch” and “the magnolia intact/still generous in its second flowering”. Wounded but alive, the poet recovers her tongue:

     She punctured the cartridge

     squeezed until dark blue words

     slid into the slit of the nib.

                        (‘Writing Him Out’)

She is a healed Lavinia that magically reassembles her pieces. She rescues herself and “swallowed him down for good” (‘Writing Him Out’), in an almost cannibalistic act that changes the stories and reaffirms her power as a human, as a woman and as a poet.

Looking up definitions of ‘shambles’ for this review, I find that it usually means ‘wreckage’ or ‘mess’ (an archaic meaning is the killing floor of a butcher’s) but that there is a usage in which it is pridefully applied to gardens whose display is a seemingly artless cascade of surprising beauty. I like the idea of adopting Shambles as a term, like Folly or Ha Ha, for landscape gardening. I suspect Elizabeth Parker would too not least since turned into a verb, ‘shambling’, the term (rhyming with rambling) also means a kind of purposeless or awkward walk or gait. In gardening or poetry, then, ‘shambles’, as demonstrated by Parker, is an oxymoron, a seemingly accidental yet entirely purposeful aesthetic reconstruction of what she encounters. As we know, there is nothing natural about landscape. Rather it’s how we design and arrange it: ‘While he stayed shut, her throat bloomed / long-stemmed flowers / threading their colors through a breeze.’ Or in ‘Dry’ a river is unclogged: 

You sleeked my snarls of algae 
brought a lush hiss to my throat 
brown trout wafting their bodies. 

It’s not all blooms and flowage though as nature is as much muck and mire or decay; ‘From Home to the Garden Centre The Forest of Dean’ makes the forest viscous with industrial leavings: ‘a forest still oozing iron, / bedrocks greased with ore.’ Nature is dangerous, with a hint of the butcher shop’s blood and offal: 

Birds, shrews, mice 
pried from the white portcullis 
of the cat’s teeth 

Mostly, though, things are humid and mouldy: ‘Our new spades prise a lid of dry soil / from loam riddled with red ants, rotten bulbs / last years hyacinths that failed to hatch / nipped and leached by microbes.’ Or, from ‘My Black Gardens’: ‘I relinquish my black gardens /  matted kelp, ripe bladderwrack. / I lose skins’. Sloughing and relinquishing extends to people, relationships: ‘A spider trails its tiny shadow / across the bathroom tiles. / Your heat is gone but there are scents’. ‘Writing Him Out’ is a nicely done ‘breakup poem’ about the ink running out (writing this poem presumably) and then rinsing the pen and flushing the watery residue: ‘The plughole glugged up stained water / then swallowed him down for good.’ 

This flowage is amplified in several poems about running water and rivers. Poets like rivers because they’re analogous to verse as well as to life. And Paker has several river poems, the best of which associates family members and friends with kinds of rivers: 

My aunt’s river grazes its banks 
and widens 
Rocks are loosed to salt her river 
        […] 
My uncle’s river remembers its monks 
their nights rowing to secret mass 
prows cutting water bonds 
to rock chapels in the gorge 

And: 

This morning my river was high 
green and urgent with rain 
rushing light and leaves toward the estuary. 

Rivers, though, are just a little too dramatic for Parker; the mood of ‘Quiet Water’ with its pipe ‘bent up from mud / its leak snaking through outgrass and deadnettle / twitching each stem,’ the field getting sodden, surprising the unwary. She favors a sense of decay, or decadence in poems that are astringently opulent. No more so than in ‘Lizzie’, her poem about the poems that Dante Gabriel Rossetti buried with his wife and then had exhumed: 

They plucked out his book 
with a bible and a worm 
leaves edged red 
bound in calfskin 
disinfectant reek 
when he unpeeled the rags. 

Against this high drama (romantic but creepy!), Parker counterpoints the hum drum of modern wordprocessing; ‘I spell-check / save as / rename / print / close / shut down.’ Parker is being ironic or self-mocking here, if she uses a word processor, her sensibility is of the fountain pen – the piercing of the cartridge, the flow of ink, the sharpness of the nib. 

Lurking behind this reference to a fountain pen is Seamus Heaney’s famous injunction to his pen, ‘I’ll dig with it’. Dig, Parker does, into genealogy, history, and the land, freighting her poems with these connections.

Reproduced with permission of PN Review. Full article available here.

This is a book of translucencies. Nothing is over-solid or overstated, nothing prosaic, yet the poems have an energy and exactness that capture relationships, places, people with unusually fine detail. Take the opening poem, ‘Crockery’. The ‘you’ it’s addressed to, never named, could be a lover, friend, anyone, but instead of being described directly, they are seen aslant, summoned by their reflections in chrome and crockery, their lip marks on a glass.

‘The wine glass has peeled a crescent from your mouth
each crease ridging the grease. I can’t look at you.’

This sets the tone for the whole of this debut collection: unexpected, lucent, precise, sharp, inventive, daring, controlled, but never heavy handed. The touch is so deft you almost think it happens by accident, then you realize how carefully crafted the poems are, and it comes as no surprise to discover Parker has a first class degree in literature and creative writing from Warwick University and an MA in mythology from Bristol. Her learning comes through in literary allusions: Titus Andronicus, Thomas Chatterton, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, but they are woven with skill, the learning never intrudes.

From Titus Andronicus, for example, Parker takes the story of Lavinia, raped then mutilated by having her tongue cut out and hands amputated so she can’t utter or write the names of her attackers. But in Parker’s beautiful reworking, in ‘Following Lavinia,’ ‘Lavinia Writes’ – and perhaps implicitly in the last poem in the collection ‘Writing him Out’ – these outrages are dealt with by a mute resistance which will not give up, the language lyrical and far-reaching.

‘They took her tongue, her hands
so she tried to write with driftwood, sand.

The sea was too strong
her words little caves water curled up in
blunting their edges.

She tried to speak again
carved deeper.’ (from ‘Following Lavinia’).

The feminism here is implicit, understated, finding a louder voice in ‘Lavinia Writes’, where the whole story becomes a parable of the silenced abused woman trying to find a language.

Other characters include a piper in Edinburgh playing Kavanagh’s On Raglan road, a piano tuner, various relatives and friends treated as water in the lyrical ‘Rivers’, but most of the figures in these poems are unnamed. ‘Woolworths’ evokes a woman through personal memories, caught in strong images, but we never know who she is. There’s a female stranger on a train in ‘10.30 To Severn Beach’. Another unnamed woman makes a white vase that seems to speak of her attempt to create and keep something beautiful, pure, inviolate. Again, images capture delicately thin yet telling slices of life. But identities, plots live under the surface. Parker never makes the mistake of milking things for meaning. She doesn’t labour points, doesn’t draw out morals, knows when to stop, when to leave the phase or the poem to stand for itself. All is oblique, hinted at, told slant.

Nor is there any one poetic form, nothing is allowed to solidify into a predictable form or shape. Instead there’s a dextrous mix of mostly 2, 3 and 4 line verses, with minimal punctuation, the text unassuming but contemporary on the page.

In the simply named ‘Lizzie’, Parker splices together the process of deleting and editing word files with Dante Gabriel Rossetti exhuming his late wife Elizabeth Siddal’s grave in Highgate so he could publish the poetry he had buried with her. Parker has researched this in detail, but refrains from writing a predictable narrative of re-enactment, instead breaking up the story with contemporary touches to create a reflection on the process of textual deletion and retrieval.

Biography isn’t always relevant, but the fact of Parker growing up in her parents’ garden centre in the Forest of Dean is surely an influence on the way she writes with such wonderful detail about the green world. There are plants, sunlight and water, a love of nature that is earthed as well as transcendent, an intuitive connection to roots, bulbs, soil, magnolia, spades, fern fronds, what lives on the surface and what lies beneath, all that is burgeoning, blossoming, seeding, lying in wait. Here too, Parker knows how to see what is out of the frame, beyond our usual way of seeing.

I should add that the book is also beautifully produced, as we have come to expect from Seren. The front cover collage by Maria Rivans, showing the head of Audrey Hepburn sprouting a surreal fascinator of birds, boats, moths, flowers, ferns, zebras, prams, women, is exquisite and utterly apt.

From the first poem in this impressive debut collection, there is a sense of mastery, of language taut yet tensile, of breath-taking imagery. The opening scene in ‘Crockery’ presents someone the speaker can’t look at, someone who we glimpse through fragmentary reflections in ‘glass, chrome, china’, the ‘pale glaze on white plates’. ‘I can’t look at you’ is repeated, accentuating the drama taking place, something edgy across a table, a domestic scene that seems to have gone wrong. The speaker’s gaze is averted so that, ‘Instead, I watch your coffee ripple/when you knock the table with your knee’, a prelude, it is suggested, to leaving, when ‘glasses clear/spoons lose their dash of colour’. 

The third poem ‘Clasp’ seems to portray an afterwards, the speaker cooking with garlic and noticing, ‘One of the first absences … a missing scent’. There is an incredible precision in this poet’s descriptions, such as, ‘She scrunches onion paper/pinches a tooth of garlic from its husk’, and her titles further the poems, as here, adding depth to their themes, clasp working as both verb and noun. Here, we have hands at work peeling garlic, sharpening a pencil ‘he enjoyed/yellow and thick as a finger … with his clasp knife’. Now, though, ‘she notices her shadow alone on the walls’. 

Hands feature in other poems. ‘Rescues’ is a tender eulogy to the speaker’s father, his hands used for rescue – of the fallow doe, the pipistrelle, house martin chicks, ‘Birds, shrews, mice/pried from the white portcullis/of the cat’s teeth…’, spiders, a buzzard and, finally, ‘His three daughters/calling to him from their cities/…/saving us each time.’ Hands are watched, explored, used to paint with, make a vase, play piano, cook with, and, crucially, write with. In ‘Manus’, the poem juxtaposes ‘an essay arguing [hands’] evolution for use of weapons’ with someone playing the piano; words on a page propounding a theory set beside ‘your rhythmic hands/bridged for Clair de Lune’. These are the same hands, it is suggested, that the speaker’s ‘skin remembers’ when ‘You tapped time on my spine’. Violence and love-making, angling the aim of a gun or making music, are thus placed together as potentials of human being and doing – yet we are left with the music of love which, ‘altered my rhythm/lifted fine threads/until my blood re-tuned.’ 

In the two ‘Lavinia’ poems, the loss – of not only hands, but tongue – comes to the fore, but you have to know who Lavinia is, for Parker doesn’t patronise her readers. She simply provides a quotation from Shakespeare’s bloodiest tragedy, Titus Andronicus, as epigraph for each poem, so you know it is that Lavinia, the character who is first barbarously raped, then silenced by having her tongue cut out and her hands lopped off. 

‘Following Lavinia’ is a sequence of four poems, three of them titled with a man’s name and the fourth poem called simply ‘Their names’. In each of the first three poems, the speaker reads the play with reference to each of the named men, such as: ‘I read the hunt … sitting at his desk’; ‘I watched the hunt with Paul’. In the final poem, though, the focus is purely on ‘her’: ‘They took her tongue, her hands/so she tried to write with driftwood, sand.’ 

There is a powerful sense created of striving for expression, of valour against the odds, against forces too strong. Parker has a canny way of bringing together tangential parts that point towards meaning – yet nothing is laid on with a trowel. Here, there is the suggestion of struggle, of how hard it is for a woman’s voice to be heard. 

‘Lavinia Writes’, which comes a little later in the collection, picks up the themes again, going for the jugular, the wound itself: ‘I dipped a finger in my mouth/strummed then picked the stitches/in the root of my stolen tongue.’ Most stanzas include ‘I’ and a verb: ‘I tipped …’, ‘I sign …’, ‘I write bright, long sentences over chairs, walls, floors’, the wound being the source: ‘I tipped my head over paper/let my words pump, breach the dam/fill fibres, glut pores.’ The theme of being without a voice, without dexterity of expression, carries its horrors, but finding voice despite the obstacles is what triumphs, what heals: ‘I tear more, free more/until I am fluent’. 

Fiona Owen 

A review from www.gwales.com, with the permission of the Welsh Books Council.